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The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
- actionfromafar 5mo agoThe robots will tell you what to do, you will own nothing, and you will be happy. I think that is the plan?
- chihuahua 5mo agoAlmost, but also don't forget the part where "you vill eat ze bugs."
- isx726552 5mo agoWhy would the doomsayers be the ones who need to answer that? That’s kind of their point! It’s the AI boosters who need to answer that, and so far it’s just a big collective shrug + silence.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoIf you have a magic robot that builds everything you want you don’t need anyone to buy anything. Jfc this site is the worst. Use your words instead of drive by downvoting.
- lorecore 5mo agoWhere do the raw materials for the thing it's building (or the robot itself for that matter) come from?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoFrom the earth. Maybe in the future space.
- lorecore 5mo agoFinite natural resources are by their very nature, limited.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoYes finite things are finite. Glad we cleared up it.
- lorecore 5mo agoFinite means not free. Who will pay?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoIf your magic robot is magic enough you own anything you want. You pay with the oldest currency in the world. Might.
- lorecore 5mo agoI don’t think pillaging the earth’s natural resources (even more than we already do) is going to go down well.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoAgreed.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoHow have you gone from Transformer based AI to a magic robot that can fabricate absolutely anything (somehow)?
- pelotron 5mo agoThen all you have to do is magically convince the owners of the magic robot to give all their products away for free.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThey already have way more than they could ever use and still try to take more.
- dijit 5mo agoNobody can answer that? There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating. But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now. The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry), and people tend to climb to higher levels of abstraction. The real question is who captures those productivity gains; and historically, it isn't the workers. Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone. Then, once the market was captured, mid-tier became the ceiling and anything above it got expensive again. Nobody won except the owners.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now. Same will happen with the jobs AI takes > Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone Like you said, cobblers just do different things now
- ryaniscool 5mo agoIt's bizarre that some of the doomsayers are AI stakeholders. It's like they don't realize that most people don't have net worth in the 7-8 figures. I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?
- mrhottakes 5mo agoThey realize it, and they don't care.
- dlev_pika 5mo agoYeah, but it doesn’t implode all at once - it’s not distributed evenly. Something like over half of the US consumption is done by the top 10%, or something insane like that. This leads me to believe that a lot more people will eat shit, before enough feel real pain.
- ryaniscool 5mo agoYes, it will take longer but all value comes from labor, so the consumption of the wealthy is literally produced by the working class. The rich can't eat money. Also, data centers, chips, and energy require massive working-class supply chains, and enterprise AI revenue depends on customers whose own revenue depends on regular consumers.
- thomascgalvin 5mo agoYou're asking a question that only applies to rational actors. Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about. AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThat is mostly true but a bit of a simplification. They exist to do what the people who have power want them to do which is not always strictly profit maximization. A ceo may realize rto will decrease profits but do it anyway because it increases the power delta between him and the workers.
- nervousvarun 5mo ago"not always strictly profit maximization." Maybe in the short-term but public companies with shareholders won't allow this in any sort of long-term way right?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoNot allow it? They insist upon it! The controlling votes are all part of the same social class. They would gladly give up a small amount of profit to keep the distance between them and the workers as large as possible.
- nervousvarun 5mo agoTo the extent it doesn't negatively impact the stock price sure but you would agree the CEO and any sort of power-trip they have is ultimately beholden to that right?
- pelotron 5mo agoWe shouldn't be surprised people have a negative view of AI when Altman et al. have stated on stage that the goal is to replace everyone.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoBecause it's not even logically possible, let alone practically
- mrhottakes 5mo agoMaybe the Altmans and Amodeis should stop saying otherwise all the time then.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoWhen a sizeable percentage of people are replaced, who buys all the products that A.I. produces? The whole system just collapses.
- Krssst 5mo agoThere will still be jobs. Manual jobs, the kind that break our backs and have us breath various stuff we shouldn't (dust, fumes). Robots are difficult and maybe not so economically viable when everyone is desperate for any job at any cost.
- tux3 5mo agoThe true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed. Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after. We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.
- garciasn 5mo agoI’m always amazed that when I tell people I intend to retire in my 50s, they tell me that I can’t possibly mean that and actively wonder how I could possibly fill my time. It’s as if we could not possibly function as humans without meaningless shifting of tangible/intangibles from one place to another. Society is so hellbent on the idea that we need our job to be our identity, they lack the imagination for another other reality. It’s ridiculous.
- bachmeier 5mo agoIt is indeed ridiculous. People saying they're going to let someone else tell them what to do with their time, energy, and calendar, even if they hate doing it. The only explanation I have is that they have been letting the wrong people program them.
- ryaniscool 5mo agoSure working sucks, but have you tried not working? I think this is from lived experience because I've gone for stretches of not working (intentionally). It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment. I know it seems counter-intuitive but if you do succeed in your dream of retiring in your 50's I think you'll understand what I mean when you get there.
- JohnFen 5mo ago
- hamdingers 5mo agoFully automated luxury space fascism doesn't really need buyers. A risk of high automation/post-scarcity is that abundance exists but remains under the control of people who are not interested in justice or equality or freedom. Lots of people feel that describes the leadership of most AI tech companies. If they don't need your labor, and they don't need you as a customer, and they don't care about you as a person... where does that leave you? [to be clear, I think post-scarcity, even in knowledge work, is a lot further off than most ai-doomsayers or ai-worshipers who take statements from people like Altman and Musk at face value]
- general1465 5mo agoBut that also assume that peasants do not have agency and won't trigger another French Revolution.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThey may they may not. The nobility has learned a lot in the past 200+ years. Powerful propaganda machines, powerful weaponry, and a small group of loyalists have proven extremely effective at controlling large populations.
- archagon 5mo agoThey won’t say it in public, but I imagine they’re betting on swarms of automated slaughterbots protecting them when things truly go to shit.
- wolvesechoes 5mo ago> But that also assume that peasants do not have agency and won't trigger another French Revolution Look at the median age of French society during the French Revolution and the current one. Who is going to trigger another French revolution? Old people coughing their lung out?
- lbrito 5mo agothe answer to every question: Agents, of course! With GPU-collaterized credit or some other idiocy.
- zombot 5mo agoIf you paint it rose-colored enough, you can even eat hot air. And rose-colored hot air will shelter you from the cold.
- gypsy_boots 5mo agoTake any econ 101 course, and you'll realize that this isn't a factor in the capitalist system. Capitalism is simply concerned with maximizing profit, and in this case, returning shareholder value. It's just simply not in the purview of the system to think about what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force. Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 years ago, before major industries unionized; making 'Amazon-bucks' that can only be redeemed at the 'Amazon company store'.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- general1465 5mo agoNo wages -> Nobody buys stuff and services -> Companies are going bankrupt -> No taxable income from consumers nor companies -> States are going bankrupt. You can either go through UBI taxing automated work by 90%+ and pretend that capitalism is still a thing, or just nationalize everything and go with communism. Henry Ford understood this problem with his Model T and realized that if he wants to sell it, he also needs to pay workers to be able to afford it.
- zombot 5mo ago> States are going bankrupt. States (or their rule-of-the-strongest successors) always have means to not go bankrupt. They will simply pillage the survivors.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force. Youre hysterical
- variadix 5mo agoThe consumer economy only exists to extract value from common people and funnel it up the wealth ladder. If robots and AI take over all the production, you don’t need a consumer economy, the robots produce and their output directly goes to the top. The rest of us are left to starve.
- general1465 5mo agoEh, no? If everything goes to top, then economy of scale just don't work and whole automation is pointless, because you can make the goods in artisan way.
- pugworthy 5mo agoI saw a talk by Brian Merchant (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/) a while back where he talked a lot about the Luddites and their revolts against automation. He's definitely not a fan of AI, but it was very interesting to hear the comparisons of AI resistance now to Luddite resistance to automation in the 1800's. There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now? It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.
- zombot 5mo agoThere's one important difference: Automation worked and was affordable. Whether slop generation by LLMs is a useful instance of automation and how any productivity achieved stacks up against real, non-subsidized costs is currently a matter of (highly propagandized) opinion at best.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> Automation worked and was affordable. Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible. Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it
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- thomascgalvin 5mo agoPeople like Altman and Musk are saying that Universal Basic Income will be necessary once AI has fully automated away most jobs, but at the same time they aggressively fight against any kind of tax policy that would allow UBI to function. I am convinced that their talk of UBI is just handwaving; they're trying to convince us that there will be a solution to the destruction of the economy as we know it, so that we'll just let them do whatever they want. It isn't the backlash against AI that will get ugly, it will be the backlash against the ten people who suddenly own the entire world's money supply
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- skybrian 5mo agoWhat’s an example where they took a side on taxes?
- hfeyb 5mo ago[dead]
- mrhottakes 5mo agoElon's companies famously pay very little in taxes, he spent last year attempting to gut the federal government, he complains constantly about how much he pays in taxes, and he's been very vocal about California's recent efforts to tax very wealthy people.
- dehrmann 5mo agoThe California Billionaire Tax is a bad idea. It's not that wealth taxes can't work (most of the US taxes property just fine), it's that taxes need to be fair and predictable. The phase-in is too narrow and its implementation is too arbitrary. Why $1B? Why $5%? Why won't CA voters hit up billionaires again?
- 5mo ago
- otikik 5mo agoMy main problem is this: - If (big If) AI actually replaces workers, then we have a problem, because lots of folk lost their jobs - If AI doesn't replace workers, then we have a recession, because a lot of the US economy now sits on top of corporations betting on it. And this will tank the economy and lots of folk will lose their jobs It feels that the only path forward is a narrow one where AI removes some jobs, but not too many, but still enough so that the (immense, disproportionate) hype that was put on it does not come with a vengeance and the house of cards falls.
- camillomiller 5mo agoIf one of both cases happens you can be sure the people most responsible will be the least affected. That is why this can get ugly. Honestly they deserve for it to get ugly. We can keep giving the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Altmans and co the benefit of the doubt
- chezelenkoooo 5mo agoI don't think it an either / or. The current AI models, as they are, improve productivity quite a bit. They're just super expensive but the expense is being subsidized so it appears reasonable. An alternative possibility is that the models become much cheaper and their use becomes more ubiquitous which would be helpful.
- zombot 5mo agoYou're ignoring historical experience. The owners of the means of production have perfected their ability to nab all the upsides of productivity gains, while the workers' best hope is wage stagnation. Combined with the promise of "we'll put everyone out of work" it's just mass poverty and death from hunger and exposure. And if it doesn't pan out, then it's still very few companies that will own the remaining market of LLM use. That's a new quality we haven't seen before, where both success and failure will have catastrophic consequences.
- naasking 5mo agoFixed pie fallacy.
- cjs_ac 5mo ago> Already, as many as a quarter of Americans seem accepting of violence as a tool for achieving political change. I'm surprised it's only a quarter: violence as a tool for achieving political change is the entire point of the right to bear arms. EDIT: I'm not arguing for or against political violence, just noting an apparent inconsistency between Americans' views and one of the documents that they talk about as though it's holy writ.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoIt's 100% accurate to say that the history of the United States is filled to the brim with political change via violence.
- tenacious_tuna 5mo agoSome friends and I read "A People's History of the United States" a while back and were surprised at how true this is. US classroom history textbooks hold civil disobedience up as the One True Way to bring change, but it's alarming how often the backdrop of famous acts of civil disobedience was in fact incredible violence. Our conclusion in our impromptu book club was that made sense: why would the state schools give students lots of examples of how violence against the state was an effective negotiating tool? It was extremely jarring to reconcile with the image of US history we'd been imbued with up to that point, which of course was also a reflection of our socioeconomic status at the time. As a counterpoint, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" is also taught in schools, so it's possible I'm just selectively remembering things.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoA truly fantastic book. I'm glad to hear of more people checking it out.
- Balgair 5mo agoTomas Rick's Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-68 should be required reading at this point https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp/0374605165 https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp... Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he goes over and over again that non-violence is not unaggressive. It is typically quite militant when done well. Non violence is a tactic, one that is typically better at achieving results than violence, as it tends to change the other side that is violent to adjust down to non violence as well. Like getting a drunk to be quieter by whispering to them (Note: that is a poor analogy). Rick's book is just so very good and my poor internet comment can't possibly do it justice. He convinced me that the Civil Rights movement is so big because it gave the US a brand new tool in conflicts. It's not just violence or submission anymore.
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- sleepyguy 5mo agohttp://archive.today/8PRnh http://archive.today/8PRnh
- dlev_pika 5mo agoLet’s hope so
- aspenmartin 5mo agoIgnoring CEO predictions, can anyone point to any major revolutionary technology that had a net negative impact on quality of life and employment statistics? AI is an incredibly powerful technological shift in our way of life but where is the net employment hit taking place? Unemployment numbers remain stable. Revolutions like this do create widening inequality while also increasing long run productivity. Yes inequality rises but what you should care about is your quality of life and that will also improve over time. There will be suffering during transition and there will be many that don’t fare well but…this happens during every major revolution—electricity the internet etc. so why do people treat AI like it’s a uniquely damaging phenomenon?
- stravant 5mo agoDon't ignore the transient. The industrial revolution created a hell on Earth for workers for the better part of a century.
- eesmith 5mo agoOr as the article puts it: "Over the long run, it’s true that the Industrial Revolution radically boosted economic growth. But living through it was another matter entirely. Many people saw their wages stagnate and working conditions deteriorate as factory owners and industrialists came into immense wealth. (Just read a Charles Dickens novel, and you’ll get the idea.) This led to riots and, occasionally, attacks on the industrialists themselves."
- mrhottakes 5mo agoYou are confusing the macro view with the personal. Try losing your job and being told "don't worry, your quality of life will improve over time!" Would you respond positively?
- aspenmartin 5mo agoMy point is: you can say the exact same thing for any other major technological revolution. Would you have preferred we stopped making the internet because some people didn’t fare well in the transition? The genie is out of the bottle so what do people want to happen here?
- simianwords 5mo ago1. If AI is like other technologies, there will be job displacement and temporary upheaval after which new jobs will be created and prosperity increases - this is by far the only good way to increase prosperity 2. If AI is so good that it is a proper superset of humans and can do all jobs humans can do, this is a huge deal and we don’t even have the vocabulary to express what would happen I don’t foresee a third option.
- throwaway-11-1 5mo agothe fact no one can actually describe these "new jobs" makes #2 appear increasingly more probable.
- simianwords 5mo agoYou can’t have predicted that an SDE 6 in Google working on ad tech using Google spanner and optimising for SEO at 1989. That’s why you can’t say how jobs can be created now.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoThey could though. They could see job creation occurring AS the internet grew. I saw Netscape become an actual company. Saw CISCO grow. Saw tons of startups that employed people and saw the kinds of jobs it was bringing. AI proponents says 'jobs appeared in the past after X, therefor they will magically appear in the future after Y' ignoring the industrial revolution started in the late 1700s and the lifestyle they brag about it delivering didn't come along until the late 1940s/1950s.
- thrill 5mo agoPlenty of people certainly seem to have desires to make it ugly.
- spwa4 5mo ago> Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don’t agree on much ... Actually they kinda do. Anyone else notice that both extremes have the same policies? (well, Bernie Sanders isn't half as extreme as the other guy of course, but I also don't know anyone better to represent the left. But he's not extreme left by any stretch of the imagination) But both extreme left and extreme right want very radical actions taken in support of the same goals (like housing, crime, ...), while the center fights them (what the US laughingly calls 2 parties). Only the exact actions differ, and even there, only somewhat. But both (almost all) democrats and (almost all) republicans, for example, defend property rights going so far as NIMBYism.
- esseph 5mo ago> Anyone else notice that both extremes have the same policies? They absolutely 100% do not. What are you even on about?
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoI find the backlash kind of saddening. As an engineer, as most of you are, I am as blown away by the achievement that is the LLM in a way not too dissimilar to how I feel about the Apollo Moon program. And furthermore, I have found it wildly useful for me (if used within contexts that play to its strengths). But I think that kind of gets to the point perhaps of the schism. I like the tech and like using it. I enjoy "testing" its capabilities—finding its boundaries… In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries. I use it, for personal use, not unlike I used the first personal computer as a tool—dare I say, "A bicycle for my mind…" The people hating AI (and I'm looking at my entire family, ha ha), I think hate AI as it is wielded as a tool by corporations. They hate Musk, Bezos, the whole lot of them—and, perhaps rightly so, they lump AI in with all that lot. Perhaps my diplomatic stance then is that AI may turn out to be empowering for the individual, might be used in a way crippling to society.
- clapthewind 5mo agoIt sounds like you're championing labor using ai. But capital will also use it and leverage it more. There's no mechanism for only labor to exploit a technology, apart from common ownership at a world level. Achieving this is left as an exercise to the ambitious.
- praptak 5mo ago"In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries" I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power. Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.